


Returning

by theoquilts



Category: Supernatural
Genre: :'), Angst, Episode: s10e21 Dark Dynasty, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Dean, Post-Episode: s10e21 Dark Dynasty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-31 01:28:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3959269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoquilts/pseuds/theoquilts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas gently opens Dean’s palms, and places the rag and bottle to one side on the countertop. Together, they are balanced on the head of a pin. Dean can’t breathe, or is holding his breath. He can’t tell. There is so much pain. </p><p>“I think I’m losing it,” Dean whispers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Returning

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for vomit, panic attacks, brief mentions of hell/suicide and spoilers for the end of 10x21, including the character death in the last scene. This isn't as bad as it seems with the warnings! Be safe though. Charlie is my perfect queer dream best friend and she deserved so much better.

Sam is throwing up. 

Dean can hear his brother retching on the steps outside– distantly, as though he was a mile away instead of a few paces. Dean’s chest heaves, the air around him pounding and swelling, his ears popping, and his vision turning black in the peripheries as he stares at her. Charlie. Charlie. Charlie. Sweetheart, he thinks, no, no, no, no, no. There’s boiling water the pit of his stomach. Charlie. 

Charlie, there’s red stained across her cheek, and Dean feels a tug behind his wrist to wipe it off, to hold the back of her head in his hands and smooth his thumbs over her eyes, her closed eyes, her d– he can’t. His body is frozen, cords of his muscles taught and unmovable, as he stands in shock looking over her body. Sweet, sweet, sweet kiddo, he thinks, sweet baby, no. The air is thickening to cement around him, and his chest is constricting, so tense it feels like his ribs could snap at any moment. It would be better, he thinks, if only because the pain would go away eventually. Sparks of adrenaline spike their way up his spinal cord, choking him. The room is empty and loud– he hears screaming and realizes that it’s his brother. Sam. Charlie. The world around him is crumbling. The carpet under his feet disintegrates and pulls his ankles through the floor into hell. Flames lick up his calfs and leave bright red welts, blackened bones through flesh. The room turns red and black until he smashes his fists into the wooden doorframe, splinters shooting up his arms as he comes back to reality.

Dean is breathing like a marathon runner, his lungs emptying and filling more desperately with each breath. Oh, God, he thinks, oh God, I loved her. Poison. Poison. Poison. 

The walls are blue. The tile is blue. White lines of plaster run between them. The motel was probably built in the 1960′s. 1970′s, maybe. A bloody footprint stains the corner near the window. Dean’s body feels like cracked boulders. 

Sam is crying now. The sound is recognizable for someone who’s been near that wailing since his brother’s birth. Hey, no, thinks some fraternal or paternal lump inside of him, and he stumbles outside to let Sam wrap his arms around Dean’s neck. All he can do is take deep breaths, his vision flashing between the middle distance of the road and Charlie’s corpse. Neck bent back at an exposed angle. An angel. An angel. Oh, sweetheart. 

When Dean’s chest starts convulsing and he begins coughing up the dust and gravel he breathed in outside the motel, he pulls away and gets up silently, funeral-marching to the bathroom to carry his friend to the car. Sam hovers behind him like a shadow, mouth open as though on the edge of words or sobs. Sam’s face is streaked with tears and dirt while Dean’s is clean and closed, like a diner at 2 AM. Lights on, but empty. Umph, he says quietly, there you go, reaching out to cradle her in his arms. 

He picks her up, the bends of her knees lining up with his elbows, so he can feel her bones and soft body for a last time. Fuck. Fuck. Dean, he thinks, you fucked this one up more than you ever fucking have. Fuck. 

Dean puts Charlie in the leather of the backseat, and tosses his cell phone at Sam, hitting him in the stomach. 

“Call Cas.”

 

Sam is sleeping in the Impala when Cas pulls up half an hour later, his vomiting and crying having exhausted him to the point of unconsciousness. Dean, meanwhile, is jittery, cleaning the blood from the bathroom and tidying the strewn papers and binders from the living room floor. A numbness has washed over him too, despite no tears having come. He feels like a shell, vibrating with the need to move, get something done, escape. 

He turns the TV on, to a spitting talk show host interviewing some famous personality. The background noise helps, a bit, and Dean tears open drawers in the kitchenette in search of a rag to wipe down the counters with. His mind is blank when footsteps climb the steel steps of the motel. 

“Dean.” 

Cas looks threadbare, worn down skin revealing purples and blues beneath his white brown cheeks. His chest is rising and falling with heavy breath, a disturbing sign of his continued humanity, and something that, to Dean, makes him look all the more serrated. 

“Dean. Dean. Stop it.” he says, crossing the room and grabbing the spray bottle from Dean’s frantic hands. 

I’m losing it, thinks Dean, I’m losing it. 

Cas gently opens Dean’s palms, and places the rag and bottle to one side on the countertop. Together, they are balanced on the head of a pin. Dean can’t breathe, or is holding his breath. He can’t tell. There is so much pain. 

“I think I’m losing it,” Dean whispers.

In an impossible moment, they stare at each other’s eyes and then into them, as Cas slowly intertwines their fingers. Glass panes connect their hearts and hands and lungs and they are frozen in the value of the air between them– and then Cas’s eyes dart all over Dean’s face and he feels it like raindrops on his cheeks– and there is an unhearable intake of breath– Cas leans–

With a roar, Dean rips his hands back and slams them down on the counter. His anger surges. Red in his chest and fire in his lungs and ache earthquaking his abdomen. Dean? This is hell, he knows it, this unbearable pain, and he screams for her death and her unfairly short life. I loved her, he thinks, so this is what happens. I knew it already. I hate it. Dean?

He yells and breaks his hand on the fake marble backsplash and slams his side into the fridge, the rage splitting him into pieces. He is not possessed or demonic, he is melting, he is boiling, Dean?, he is falling and screaming and hot tears are spilling down his face and filling his mouth. I hate the poison that I am, he thinks. Dean!

When things stop, he becomes aware of Cas’s lovely (lovely?) face, contorted and wide open with fear. Dean can feel his solid hands on the back of his neck, smoothing over the front of his shirt and up under his chin. He feels an urge to close the distance, press up against him and become a part of his angelic human body, but they cannot touch. The air is thickly contaminated by death. He breathes in. 

Time passes and Dean realizes Cas is searching for his eyes. The first time his friend’s lips move, only emptiness comes out, and Cas swallows, imploring, coughs a little, pauses. 

“Can I hold her?”

Another wave of grief rocks through Dean, and he nods. 

By the time he makes it to the front steps of the motel, Cas has carefully opened the door to the Impala to avoid waking Sam, and is gently lifting her into his lap. His mouth twists downward but his eyes are light for a few moments, almost hopeful, until they settle back into lidded exhaustion. He lowers his chin and leans his temple against the windowpane, a picture of unhappiness. 

Dean pretends Charlie is asleep. There is a gardening show playing through the tinny speakers of the motel TV. The iron railing digs into Dean’s back. All he can think is that Cas is beautiful, and Charlie is dead, and nothing will ever be this painful or unfair again. 

His heart can no longer stretch to hold the sorrow. 

 

It is nighttime. The landscape is alight with pinpricks; stars above Dean’s head, the chirps and whispers of bugs in the cornfields. His lungs are working exceptionally well, especially considering the circumstances. He remembers the night Castiel waded into that water. He remembers closing his eyes and feeling the stars burn onto the tops of his eyelids. He remembers drinking a bottle of whisky and lying behind the Impala, the wind combing through his hair. He remembers wishing for those solid clay fingers to be brushing his shoulder and pulling his jacket over his arms. He remembers lying on his side in the wind, the tears leaking out. He remembers Castiel being gone. Even in Cas’s returning, he was weak. 

 

Dean is shaking. He sees Cas’s strong arms curled around Charlie’s porcelain face and neck. After they met, he remembers, they spoke for weeks. It felt like fireworks in his chest whenever he walked into a room and they were sitting together, alone, talking. It felt like whenever he used to come home to Bobby’s house after driving for days. It felt like watching Sam and Sarah kiss for the first time outside her house. It felt like family. Charlie is dead. Charlie is never going to be alive again. She is gone. 

 

The cold night air cuts through Dean’s shirt. It cuts through his skin. It cuts through his eyelashes and cuts cold tears from his eyes. He scrubs a hand across his face. Sam is having a nightmare in the front seat. Cas is awake, frowning, and running his hand through Charlie’s hair. Dean buries his head in his hands. What is there to do? What can there possibly be left? All that is left is silence. Dean is crying and shaking and choking. The night air is endlessly blowing in all directions. He is empty and alone. He is gone. 

He falls asleep.

 

Sam wakes him up by shaking his shoulders. Dean’s body feels like it’s made out of a chain link fence. He slept for four hours awkwardly sprawled on the motel stairs. Dean can barely remember what happened, until he does, realizing only as he blinks away the fog that he rested better that night than he had done for months. 

Exhaustion, he thinks. He remembers after they saved the world. You sleep like a baby. Then it starts to hurt.

The pain hums languidly from his heart to his stomach, through his veins to the tips of his fingers and down the backs of his legs. He remembers the panic attack, the glass shattering, the vomit, the tears. Suddenly, he does not want to be awake. His world is collapsing around him for the second time in so many hours. His bones are shattering. Sam is smiling at him. Sam’s eyes are wet, a little bit. Dean is half asleep and halfway to hell. Dean, in that moment, wants to die and be dead.

“I think you’ll wanna see this,” says Sam. His voice shakes a little bit. Sam is big, and his body blocks Dean’s view of the car until he steps aside. 

Inside, the sun reflects through the golden and blue window. There is Cas, with his arms around Charlie. Dean doesn’t want to look – her stillness is oceanic. How many times can his chest rupture? She is gone. 

“Come around to the car.”

When Cas looks up at Dean, his eyes are wet too. His lips are turned upwards, just enough for Dean to notice. There is hope in those eyes and lips. Cas reaches up to take Dean’s hand, and places it over Charlie’s pulse. 

Cas tries to speak but his voice fails him at first. He licks his lips, swallows.

Dean presses his fingers into Charlie’s artery. 

“My grace.”

Cas is weak, but he still has some power, and he has spent the night wrapped up in this girl.

“It…”

Cas is crying happy tears. The sun is golden in his blue eyes. Dean is crying as well, he is sobbing, he is reaching into the car, he is tripping over his feet and landing with his legs and arms around Cas and around Charlie, he is sobbing into his shoulder words like thank you, thank you, I love– thank you. 

She has a pulse. It is weak. Dean knows it is beginning to return.


End file.
